Quick Answer
The Arbatel is the grimoire with no demons in it. Printed anonymously in Basel in 1575, forty-nine aphorisms long, it contains no circle, no coercion, no threats and almost no ritual. Its instructions are to fear God, avoid vanity, choose one vocation and pursue it properly, pray sincerely, and expect to be given only what you are given. It can be read in an hour and it is cited far more often than it is read.
Key Takeaways
- No demons, no binding, no circle. It is the clearest alternative in the corpus to the Solomonic model of command.
- The Olympic Spirits enter Western magic here, and travel from this book into Barrett and thence into modern practice.
- It promises nine books and delivers one. The other eight were never written as far as anyone can tell.
- The operative content is almost nil. If you want a ritual, this is not the book, and that is deliberate.
- Basel in 1575 was a Paracelsian printing centre, and the text's outlook fits that milieu, which is the best guess anyone has about its origin.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
Arbatel De Magia Veterum was printed in Basel in 1575, in Latin, without an author's name. It is very short. The whole surviving text amounts to forty-nine numbered aphorisms arranged in seven groups of seven, which in a modern edition is perhaps thirty pages.
It belongs to the genre usually called grimoires, books of magical instruction, and it is the odd one out in that genre by a considerable distance. Where its neighbours give you seals to draw, names to pronounce, incense to burn and spirits to compel, the Arbatel gives you advice about your character.
Its reputation in modern occult writing is large. Its actual readership, judging by how it is described in secondary sources, is small.
Even the title is a mystery. Nobody has established what Arbatel means or refers to. It has been read as an angel's name, as a corruption of something in Hebrew, and as an invention. The word appears in the title and then does not do any work in the text, which is itself a small clue about how the book was assembled.
The Eight Books That Never Came
The text opens by announcing that it is the first of nine books, and it names them.
What survives is the Isagoge, the introduction. The others are given titles concerning microcosmic magic, Olympic magic, the magic of Hesiod and Homer, Roman magic, Pythagorean magic, the magic of Apollonius, and Hermetic magic.
None of them exists. No manuscript has ever surfaced, no contemporary refers to having seen one, and there is no evidence any were written.
Three explanations are available. The nine-book scheme may be a rhetorical frame, establishing the work's scope and lineage without any intention of completion. It may be a publisher's advertisement for a series that did not sell. Or it may be a genuine plan interrupted by death, suppression or loss of nerve.
The effect either way is that readers have been reading an introduction to something that does not exist for four hundred and fifty years, which accounts for a good deal of the book's mystique.
Basel, 1575
The publication context is the best evidence about where the text came from.
The printer was Pietro Perna, an Italian working in Basel, and Basel in the later sixteenth century was one of the most important centres in Europe for printing Paracelsian medicine and natural philosophy. Perna published a great deal of Paracelsus and related material.
That matters because the Arbatel's outlook fits the Paracelsian milieu closely. Paracelsus and his followers held that the natural world is full of powers placed there by God for human use, that the wise physician works with those powers, that this knowledge is a gift rather than a technique, and that the corrupt practitioner is dangerous. They also used the term Olympic for a category of spirits.
Scholars have therefore located the text in or near Paracelsian circles, and various specific attributions have been proposed without any becoming accepted. The honest position is that the milieu is identifiable and the author is not.
What Makes It Different
Set the Arbatel beside its neighbours and the difference is immediate.
The Key of Solomon requires purifications, consecrated tools, robes, a circle drawn to specification, timing by planetary hour, and conjurations that escalate through commands to threats. The Lesser Key and the Goetia catalogue seventy-two spirits with seals and titles and legions, and the operator's safety depends on the integrity of the circle.
The Arbatel has none of this. There is no circle because there is nothing to be protected from. There are no threats because the beings addressed are not adversaries. There is no elaborate apparatus because the text does not think apparatus is what makes the difference.
What it has instead is a moral programme. Be honest. Do not be curious about things that are not your business. Do not seek power, wealth or reputation through this. Do not publish or sell what you receive. Keep your word. Do the work in front of you. Pray plainly. And accept that what is given is given at God's discretion and may be nothing.
The theological logic is coherent and is worth stating plainly, because modern readers often miss it. If the spirits are creatures of God and not rebels, then coercing them is both impious and unnecessary. You do not bind a servant of the same master. You ask, and the answer depends on whether you are the kind of person who should be given it. The entire apparatus of circles and constraints in the Solomonic tradition presupposes that you are dealing with something hostile. The Arbatel simply denies that premise.
The Olympic Spirits
The most-quoted content is the account of seven governors associated with the classical planets.
Aratron is the governor of Saturn, and his gifts run to teaching alchemy, magic and medicine, to making the barren fruitful, to invisibility, and to matters of long duration and hidden things.
Bethor belongs to Jupiter, and is associated with rapid elevation to dignities, with treasure, with reconciliation and with the spirits of the air.
Phaleg is Mars, called the lord of war, and his gifts concern honours in matters of conflict.
Och is the Sun, associated with the perfection of medicine, with the transmutation of metals, with long life and with the giving of excellent servants.
Hagith is Venus, associated with beauty, with the conversion of metals, and with faithful affections.
Ophiel is Mercury, associated with learning, with the arts, and with the swift acquisition of skill.
Phul is the Moon, associated with water, with health and long life, and with the changing of things.
The descriptions are brief and the associations are conventional planetary attributions with a Renaissance inflection. What is distinctive is not the list but the framing: these are presented as legitimate governors under God, doing an assigned job, not as powers to be captured.
The Province System
The text then supplies an administrative structure, and it is the strangest thing in the book.
The world is divided into one hundred and ninety-six Olympic provinces, distributed among the seven governors in descending sevens. Saturn's Aratron governs forty-nine, Jupiter's Bethor forty-two, Mars's Phaleg thirty-five, the Sun's Och twenty-eight, Venus's Hagith twenty-one, Mercury's Ophiel fourteen, and the Moon's Phul seven. The arithmetic works: the total is one hundred and ninety-six.
Each governor is said to rule in turn for a period of four hundred and ninety years, and the text supplies a chronology assigning historical epochs to particular governors.
The scheme is numerically elegant and historically meaningless. Four hundred and ninety is seventy times seven, one hundred and ninety-six is fourteen squared, and the descending sevens are obviously constructed rather than observed. The chronology does not correspond to any recognisable pattern in actual history, and different editions and later writers have adjusted the dates to make them come out where they wanted.
It is best understood as a Renaissance exercise in cosmic bookkeeping, of the same family as the elaborate correspondences in Agrippa, and it should not be mistaken for a prediction system.
What the Aphorisms Say
The forty-nine aphorisms are the actual substance and they are mostly not about spirits at all.
They define magic as wisdom, specifically the knowledge of the works of God and of how to use what he has placed in creation. They divide it into kinds and condemn most of them. They insist that the whole enterprise is a gift, distributed as God chooses, and that no procedure compels the gift.
They warn repeatedly against the wrong motives: curiosity for its own sake, the desire for reputation, the pursuit of wealth, and the attempt to know things that are none of your concern. The person who wants power is identified as precisely the person who will not receive it and will be deceived instead.
They contain a good deal of ordinary practical advice. Keep your accounts honestly. Do not be idle. Be content. Do not talk about what you know. Avoid drunkenness. Be useful to your neighbours.
And they contain a strong prohibition on trafficking in the material: not to publish it indiscriminately, not to sell it, not to teach it to the unworthy. The irony of a printed book saying this was presumably not lost on whoever wrote it.
Choose One Thing
One aphorism deserves separate attention because it is the most useful thing in the book and has nothing to do with magic.
The text instructs the reader to determine what their vocation actually is, to settle on it, and to pursue it with everything they have rather than scattering across many pursuits. It treats the failure to do this as a spiritual problem rather than a practical one: a person who will not commit to one office is refusing the place they have been given.
The associated instruction, often rendered as living to yourself and to the Muses, means avoiding the crowd, avoiding the courting of patrons and reputations, and doing the work.
Coming in the middle of a book about planetary governors, this is startling and it is entirely consistent with the rest. The Arbatel's position throughout is that what qualifies a person is what they are and what they do, and that the metaphysical machinery is downstream of that. A man who cannot settle to a trade is not going to be entrusted with the secrets of Saturn.
The Missing Ritual
Readers coming to this book for practice are usually surprised and often disappointed.
There is no ceremony. What the text describes amounts to this: prepare yourself, be in a state of honesty and sincerity, find a clean and quiet place where you will not be interrupted, pray plainly to God, and name the governor whose help you seek. That is very close to the whole of it.
No seals to engrave. No metals to cast on particular days. No incense. No specific hours beyond the general planetary attributions. No words of power. No lengthy conjuration.
Two readings of this absence are possible. Either the operative material was meant to be in the eight books that never appeared, or the point is that there is no operative material and the state of the practitioner is the entire method. The text's own logic supports the second reading, and it is the reading that makes the book interesting.
On approaching grimoires generally. This article is a review of a historical text, not instruction. Sixteenth-century magical literature is a subject with real scholarship behind it and also a fringe where people take on practices they do not understand, sometimes with poor results for their sleep, their finances and their relationships. If you are drawn to this material, read the history first, treat any source promising results as suspect, and be particularly careful of anyone selling access, initiation or removal of curses. The Arbatel's own advice on this point is unusually sound: do not seek power, and be suspicious of what arrives too easily.
How It Reached England
English-speaking magic received the Arbatel through Robert Turner, who translated it in 1655.
Turner did not publish it alone. It appeared in a composite volume alongside the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, a work falsely attributed to Agrippa, and several other tracts including material on geomancy and on the natures of spirits.
That collection turned out to be one of the most consequential publications in the history of English occultism. For the next two centuries it was the principal route by which Latin magical material reached practitioners without Latin, and its contents were copied, excerpted and recombined endlessly.
One consequence is that the Arbatel travelled bound to a forgery, and many later readers assumed a connection to Agrippa that does not exist.
Where the Spirits Went Next
The Olympic Spirits had a long career after 1655.
Francis Barrett incorporated the material into The Magus in 1801, a compilation which drew heavily on Turner's volume and on Agrippa, and which became the standard English source for the nineteenth-century revival.
From Barrett the seven governors entered the working vocabulary of Victorian and twentieth-century ceremonial magic, appearing in the periphery of the Golden Dawn material and in a great deal of subsequent practical writing. They remain in active use.
What largely did not travel with them was the Arbatel's ethical frame. The spirits were extracted and set into ritual systems of exactly the kind the original text declines to provide, which is a fair illustration of how these traditions actually transmit: the nameable content moves and the argument stays behind.
Where It Is Weak
Three honest points.
It is fragmentary. Announcing nine books and delivering one leaves a text that gestures constantly at material it does not contain, and some of its apparent depth is the depth of an absence.
The province and chronology system is arbitrary. It is presented with the confidence of a genuine scheme and it is number play, and readers should not spend time trying to make it work.
And its piety, while genuinely distinctive, also functions as protection. Publishing a book on magic in Reformation Basel was dangerous, and a text that repeatedly insists on the fear of God, condemns unlawful arts, and offers nothing operative is a text that is difficult to prosecute. That does not make the piety insincere. It does mean we cannot fully separate what the author believed from what the author could safely print.
Which Edition to Read
Joseph Peterson's edition gives a modern English translation with the Latin alongside, plus notes identifying sources, parallels and the history of the text. It is the scholarly choice and it is the edition linked below.
Robert Turner's 1655 translation is out of copyright and freely available. It is worth reading for the language and for the sense of how the material was received in English, and it is not a reliable guide to what the Latin says.
For context, read it alongside Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, which is the great systematic work of the period, and alongside the Picatrix, which represents the older Arabic tradition of astral magic that fed into all of this.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are interested in the history of Western magic and want to see the road not taken. Almost everything that followed took the Solomonic route of names, seals and compulsion. This is the surviving statement of the alternative, and it is a coherent one.
Read it if your picture of Renaissance magic comes from popular culture and involves pentagrams and demons. That picture is drawn from one strand of a varied literature, and this text is the clearest evidence that serious people in the period held a quite different view.
Read it because it is an hour of your life. There is no excuse for the number of people who cite this book without having read thirty pages.
Do not read it for operative instruction, because there is none. Do not read it expecting the eight missing books to be implied in the surviving one, because they are not. And do not read it as a system, because it is a short work of moral and religious advice with a planetary table attached.
The best line of argument in this book is the one about who receives things. The Arbatel holds that no procedure compels a gift, that the person who wants power for its own sake is disqualified by the wanting, and that what qualifies you is what you have actually become. That is an unwelcome thought in any field, because it removes the possibility of a technique that works regardless of the operator. Everywhere people look for methods that will produce results independent of their character, and everywhere the people who get the results turn out to have spent years becoming the sort of person the result belongs to. A sixteenth-century pamphlet about planetary governors puts that more plainly than most modern writing on expertise.
Forty-nine aphorisms, seven governors, and no circle to stand in.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Arbatel?
A short Latin work on magic, printed anonymously in Basel in 1575, consisting of forty-nine aphorisms arranged in seven groups of seven. It presents itself as the first of nine books, of which the other eight never appeared. It is one of the most cited and least read texts in the Western magical tradition.
Who wrote it?
Nobody knows. It was published without an author's name by the Basel printer Pietro Perna, who was a major publisher of Paracelsian works, and the text's outlook has led scholars to place it in Paracelsian circles. No attribution has been established.
What makes it different from other grimoires?
It contains no demons, no coercion, no threats, no protective circle and almost no ritual apparatus. Where the Solomonic tradition constrains and commands spirits, the Arbatel instructs the reader to be honest, avoid vanity, do their work, pray sincerely, and wait to be given what God chooses to give.
Who are the Olympic Spirits?
Seven governors associated with the classical planets: Aratron of Saturn, Bethor of Jupiter, Phaleg of Mars, Och of the Sun, Hagith of Venus, Ophiel of Mercury and Phul of the Moon. Between them they govern one hundred and ninety-six provinces of the world, and they are said to rule in succession.
How does the province system work?
The provinces are allotted in descending sevens: forty-nine to Saturn's governor, then forty-two, thirty-five, twenty-eight, twenty-one, fourteen, and seven to the Moon's, totalling one hundred and ninety-six. Each governor is said to rule in turn for four hundred and ninety years. The scheme is arithmetically tidy and corresponds to no actual chronology.
Does it give any rituals?
Barely. There is no elaborate ceremony, no long conjuration, no equipment list and no set of seals to inscribe. What operative instruction exists amounts to a short sincere prayer offered in a clean and undisturbed place, with the emphasis placed entirely on the state of the person praying.
What does it say magic is?
Wisdom, and specifically the knowledge of the works of God and how to use them, received as a gift rather than seized. The text divides magic into kinds, condemns most of what its contemporaries were doing under that name, and treats the ungodly practitioner as a fool who will get what he deserves.
How did it reach English readers?
Through Robert Turner's translation of 1655, published together with the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy attributed falsely to Agrippa and several other tracts. That collection was the single most important source of Latin magical material for English-speaking practitioners for the next two centuries.
Why is it so influential?
Because the Olympic Spirits entered the mainstream of Western occultism through it, reappearing in Francis Barrett's The Magus in 1801 and from there in nineteenth and twentieth-century magical writing. Its non-coercive approach also gave later practitioners an alternative model to the Solomonic one.
Are there really nine books?
The text lists titles for nine and only the first survives. There is no evidence the others were ever written. The framing may be a rhetorical device, a publisher's ambition, or a genuine plan that was abandoned, and no manuscript of the missing eight has ever surfaced.
Is it worth reading today?
Yes, and it takes about an hour. It is the clearest surviving statement of a piety-first approach to spirit work, it is a useful corrective to the impression that Renaissance magic was all coercion and demons, and it is short enough that there is no excuse for citing it without having read it.
Which edition should I buy?
Joseph Peterson's edition gives a modern translation alongside the Latin, with notes tracing the sources and the transmission. Robert Turner's 1655 English text is in the public domain and freely available, and is worth reading for the seventeenth-century idiom rather than for accuracy.
Pick your one office
Buried among the planetary governors is an instruction that costs nothing to test and is harder than any of the rest of it. Work out what your actual vocation is, commit to it, and stop scattering. The Arbatel treats a person who will not settle to one thing as spiritually rather than practically defective, which is a strong claim and probably the right one. Four hundred and fifty years later, the failure it describes is more available than ever, and the remedy has not changed.
Sources & References
- Arbatel De Magia Veterum, Basel, 1575, printed by Pietro Perna.
- Peterson, J. H., ed. and trans. Arbatel: Concerning the Magic of the Ancients. Ibis Press.
- Turner, R., trans. (1655). The English Arbatel, published with the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy.
- Barrett, F. (1801). The Magus, which carried the Olympic Spirits into nineteenth-century occultism.
- Agrippa, H. C. Three Books of Occult Philosophy, the systematic work of the period.
- Scholarship on Paracelsian publishing in Basel and on the Perna press.
- Studies of the grimoire tradition and its transmission into English.